Sean Gaffney

By Etorouji Shiono. Released in Japan in two separate volumes by Square Enix, serialization ongoing in the magazine Young Gangan. Released in North America by Yen Press.

After finishing this first omnibus, you can absolutely see why Übel Blatt was licensed, and why I think it will do very well over here. The plot is straightforward and is the sort of thing that lends itself to a long, drawn-out story. The hero is mostly likeable (more on that later) and you understand his burning need for revenge; the action, though incredibly bloody and violent, is well-drawn and not at all confusing. You find yourself drawn into the story and wanting to find out what happens next. It’s very well-written. It also has a rape so mind-bogglingly appalling in the first few pages that my jaw dropped, as well as two “semi-consensual” sex scenes that also push the limits. So there’s that.

Let’s back up a bit and talk about that plot. It may seem very familiar to fans of The Seven Deadly Sins, and that’s because it’s the exact same plot. Of course, Übel Blatt started in 2004, a good 8 years before Kodansha’s shonen series, so any inspiration most likely runs the other way. In any case, we have a typical manga fantasy world, where everyone is living in castles or huts but we also have flying zeppelins. The young man on the cover is Köinzell, who flashbacks show was once a cute young kid but now appears to be older, far more angry and bitter, and not quite human anymore. He’s on a mission to wipe out the legacy he and his companions left behind, one that has him and three other (seemingly dead) friends branded as traitors. Along the way, he meets a young girl trying to save her brother, an even younger girl just trying to get to the next country, and a seemingly endless number of evil monks.

This is a fun series. Köinzell is mostly serious, even in his lovemaking, but this isn’t really a manga that needs comedy relief. Even the token little girl who gets taken along for the ride doesn’t really get too many wacky antics here. The first half came out as a “Volume 0” in Japan, but unlike most other Volume 0s appears to have actually debuted at the same time as Vol. 1, so I will assume it’s not ‘go back and rewrite the backstory to make it fit what I have now’. There are some men and women in the background I’d like to see more of.

It’s just very hard to recommend a manga where you have to admit that it begins with one of the mook villains explicitly raping a woman, then when he tosses her aside to rant for a bit, his HORSE decides he’s going to get some as well. I understand the need to show that this is a desperate and horrible world which our heroes will need to save, but there are better ways to do it than this. What’s more, Köinzell (who is, to be fair, not the usual sexless hero, something that surprised me) is not much better, recognizing a young woman’s crush on him and having her stripped and his hand down her pants within ten seconds.

Thus my recommendation of this series is tempered by “if you can get past the rape, assault, and non-consensualness with many of the female characters”. I hate saying that. As with Japan, I suspect Übel Blatt’s main audience are young college-aged men who like fantasy series with a lot of sex and violence, and this is probably better than a few others coming along, though I’d try Berserk (which has similar issues all around) first.

By Satsuki Yoshino. Released in Japan by Square Enix, serialization ongoing in the magazine Gangan Online. Released in North America by Yen Press.

The genre of ‘Fish out of water city boy moves to the country and is slowly won over by the laid-back, charming ways of the locals’ is so well known in Japan that it’s become a bit of a cliche, but we don’t see it too often over here in North America, likely as it’s almost always filled with hard-to-translate dialect humor, lacks a big, eventful plot, and relies essentially on being heartwarming. The series Yotsuba&! has a similar feel, but whereas that’s all about the child, Barakamon is definitely about the young man, Seishuu Handa, and his reactions to his new neighbors and attempts to deal with the mess he’s made of his life.

The thing I like best about Handa is that he’s got a lot of decent guy underneath him, he just tends to stress out a lot and overreact to things. I have issues with this myself, so can identify. His constant admission of hating children does not really mean that he’s bad at dealing with them – at times he proves to be even better than their local teacher, and certainly bonds straight away with young Naru, the first-grade girl who practically moves in with him from day one. But he’s at a crossroads in life after one very ill-advised tantrum (he had to move from the city as everyone thought of him as ‘the guy who punched an old man with a cane’), and worse, he’s starting to see the old man’s point about his calligraphy.

Calligraphy is Handa’s profession, but trust me, you don’t need to be an expert to enjoy this – god knows I’m not. I did smile when I saw Handa’s efforts to have fun while writing characters, and later on seeing the calligraphy filling a room that he called his failures. He understands his problem but is unsure how to fix it – somewhere we’ve all been. The basic cure is likely “stop being so serious”, something I expect the rest of the cast will take care of before too long.

Other than young Naru, the rest of the cast get introduced fast and furious, but haven’t stuck around as long. She has a shy friend, Hina, and a young boy who has a crush on her and doesn’t know what to do. There’s also Hiroshi, a young high schooler whose idea of effort, and what everyone else expects of him, is frustrating to both him and the reader. This was probably my favorite chapter in the volume, as Hiroshi gradually comes to realize that he may THINK he’s giving effort, but compared to others he really does deserve all the average grades he gets. It also shows off our hero’s tenacity.

The presentation is good – there’s a final page explaining the title and some of the dialect jokes. The dialect itself is translated as ‘vaguely Southern’, but not enough to really jar the way some other publications have done (I’m thinking Osaka from Azumanga here). The plot reminds me of Yotsuba&! combined with Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei, and how can you go wrong with that? Anyone who enjoys slice-of-life mangas should enjoy this one, and given it’s 10+ volumes in Japan, Yen has fast-tracked it, so expect another volume in 2 months.

By Matsuri Hino. Released in Japan by Hakusensha, serialized in the magazine LaLa. Released in North America by Viz.

And so after 19 volumes, we come to the end of this particular journey. Yes, there’s a novel due out next month, but for the main manga, this is it. There’s even a limited edition, which has (in my opinion) a better cover art picture and a limited edition hardcover artbook, which features some lovely character pieces. Vampire Knight has always been a series that I’ve found to be of the moment. I may forget what’s actually going on the moment I put down the book, but while I’m reading the book, I’m swept along by the drama and emotions going on within. This last volume takes that and amps it up even further, as Yuki and Kaname compete to see who can out-self-sacrifice each other.

This is not to say there aren’t some issues. The incestuous subtext that’s been bubbling under the entire series becomes text early in this volume, and while it’s not dwelled on, I can’t say I was all that happy with it. Most of the supporting players who had large roles earlier in the series are reduced to little more than cameos here, though again it was excellent to see Yuki’s human best friend, Sayori, pop up to remind us that the world isn’t entirely vampires. (Nice flashforward as well.) And of course the entirely of this volume seems to feature both Kaname and Zero trying their best to protect Yuki by removing any agency she might have to strike off on her own, which usually makes me growl, but…

Yuki isn’t having any of it. The series has balanced a knife edge as to whether Yuki will finally slip and become a princess who needs to be protected and rescued or a knight who does the rescuing, and it’s to Hino’s credit that the final decision is Yuki’s, and it’s to live up to the title. Possibly the best panel in the entire volume shows Yuki, in her school uniform and sword in hand, dragging Aido (who is literally flapping in the wind” while shouting “We’ve got an academy to protect!” It does a heart good to see this.

As for Kaname’s master plan, well, in the end there’s not much they can do about it, but they do manage to find a sort of deus ex machina that can be fired off after a thousand years. The epilogue shows that all of the hatred and political intrigue that has dominated vampire life (and the series in general) seems to have dissipated. And Yuki and Zero are together, though this is given really short shrift – in the end, it’s not about whether Yuki ends up with her brother or her classmate, it’s about Yuki working with others to save both vampires and humans. Romance is an afterthought.

Vampire Knight’s pleasures may be fleeting, but that doesn’t make them any less enjoyable. A lot of Vampire Knight’s covers have featured the main characters looking out at the reader, and the limited edition one does the same, with Yuki, Zero and Kaname lying exhausted yet satisfied (yes, yes, OT3), and saying to the reader, “We’re done. Is this enough?” It’s a very good conclusion.

By Sana Shirakawa, Quin Rose, and Nana Fumitsuki, based on the game by Quin Rose. Released in Japan by Ichijinsha. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

The Alice spinoffs, which is to say everything but the 6 main books that Tokyopop/Yen Press put out, have always had an issue to deal with which is to say that they’re made for readers in Japan who have played the original games that the series is based on. North America hasn’t really had that luxury, even though we do now have a somewhat machine-translated tablet version of the Hearts game. So there’s always a risk that you read something that requires, if not prior knowledge, at least passing familiarity with the game world you’re in. Or, as in the case of this light novel, you have a product that lots of times seems to read like an advertisement for a game you can’t get over here.

That isn’t to say this isn’t a good novel, it’s quite well-written. The prose flows well (excellent translation by William Flanagan), and Alice and Blood, the main stars, sound like themselves. The premise, as you may have guessed, has Alice dropped in another world, a la Clover or Joker. But whereas Hearts had Alice looking for a passionate love, and Clover had Alice develop a relationship based on friendship turning to love, here she’s further in the past of Wonderland, no one knows who she is, and everyone starts out disliking her intensely. (Hence “Diamonds”.) Alice has her hands full trying to deal with this, and it’s not helped by ending up at Hatter Mansion with a Blood Dupre who’s far less adept at being aloof yet teasing than she remembers.

This book is drenched in the Blood/Alice ship, and fans of other ships won’t get much here. Eliot fans should particularly stay away, as he’s abused and beaten by Blood throughout, usually when he’s trying to shoot Alice. As for new characters, the White Queen and her Black Rabbit barely get a look, so most of what we get is Jericho Bermuda, the Gravekeeper, who seems to be based on Carroll’s dodo bird. He’s Alice’s oasis of calm in the excitement of dealing with Hatter mobster wars, and it’s frustrating that most of the hints we get about him being a “walking dead man” are not answered here.

There aren’t the sharp edges I like in some of the other Alice spinoffs – Alice doesn’t think of Lorina once, and most of her worries once she’s fallen in love come from a fear that she’ll switch countries again. The Hatter family are more battle ready and drenched in blood than the earlier games, as they’re still gaining power. But mostly I think this is a good book that makes a reader yearn to play the game. We want to see what’s up with the White Queen switching between child and adult form, like the Twins used to do. (They’re just adults here.) We’d like to see why the Black Rabbit seems to hate Alice (inverse of Peter, I expect.) Joker was mentioned to be here as well, but remains unseen. Jericho looks to be the author rewriting Mary Gowland to be less irritating, but who knows?

So this is a very good novel for Alice fans who want to dip into prose, or Alice/Blood shippers. But it also frustrated me, as it offers many questions without answers as well.

By Yuu Kamiya and Mashiro Hiiragi. Released in Japan by Media Factory, serialized in the magazine Comic Alive. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

Ah, Comic Alive, my old nemesis. We meet again. I see this time you’ve brought a title that I would probably find quite interesting were it not for the grotesque fanservice that is sprinkled throughout and unavoidable. Again. In fact, that seems to be your only weapon, really, though I was pleased by your one victory in the ‘yuri’ genre. Can’t we have more like Whispered Words and less like this? And so as ever, I’m left to figure out if there’s enough remaining in the title to pull me in, or if I’m going to be driven off by an excess of panty flashing, underage nudity, and boob groping. All of which No Game No Life has plenty of.

This is another in the increasingly popular genre of ‘gamers suddenly find themselves in a game world’, but with a slight twist. Our brother/sister heroes don’t find themselves in the game they were playing (and crushing everyone – they’re master gamers), but in a fantasy world where war has been replaced by games – any games, and the stakes can be quite high. As they struggle to figure out the history and rules of this new world, they meet the story’s designated victim, Princess Stephanie, who has just lost her kingdom due to being too naive, honest, and tsundere. Luckily for her, they’re not only master gamers, but total savants – with a few minor quirks.

Let’s break down the quirks, which are really the best and worst reasons to pick up this title. Sora is another overly perverse virgin whose first thought on winning a ‘ask anything of the pretty girl’ game is to ask the girl to fall in love with him. Shiro, while occasionally playing the jealous sister card, seems OK with him groping and assaulting said girl as long as it goes through her first. They are supposedly siblings (I will be very unsurprised if this turns out not to be true later on) but Sora professes he has no sexual desire towards Shiro… but that doesn’t stop them being all over each other anyway, thus gaining the best of both worlds for those who like that fetish.

So where’s the good? For all their smug confidence, much of which is justified, Sora and Shiro are two very broken teens (Shiro is 11, but whatever). If they’re apart from each other at all, they both have crippling breakdowns – we saw at the start they were a NEET (him) and a truant (her). Indeed, Shiro may actually have some sort of disorder – I’m not sure if her broken speech is meant to be a cute affectation or something more basic. And Ias I said earlier, they really do seem to be as good as they say they are – Shiro memorized a book almost instantly, and Sora, while not as good as that, is still said to be able to pick it up in a few hours.

So the question remains, what will the story do with these two? If it develops as a tale of how they deal with this world and its inhabitants while working to get over their social phobias, that’s quite a good possibility. That said, I expect the service is not going away and may even get worse. There is a light novel coming this spring, too. In the end, I suppose if you read Comic Alive stuff, you’ll enjoy this. If not, it might be interesting for the siblings, but I’d wait a few volumes to see if that pans out.

By Ema Toyama. Released in Japan as “GDGD-DOGS” by Kodansha, serialized in the magazine Aria. Released in North America by Kodansha Comics.

Ema Toyama’s career over here in North America has been a bit slow to build. Pixie Pop came out back in the Tokyopop days, and if I recall had a heroine who was a bit flat. Del Rey then brought over I Am Here!, whose heroine, while slightly better, was still not quite there. Then came Missions of Love, which introduced us to the love quadrangle from hell. Yukina is on a whole other level from her other heroines, and even though some fans are grumping about her losing her ‘snow princess’ facade as she falls in love, there’s no doubt she’s fascinating. And now we have Kanna, the heroine of Manga Dogs, a high school girl who’s also an active manga artist with a story in the back end of a shoujo magazine. What will her character development be like?

As it turns out, any character developemnt is completely irrelevant! Because Manga Dogs is not another shoujo romantic comedy. Toyama has said in the past how Kumeta Koji is one of her favorite authors, particularly Sayonara, Zetsubou-sensei and Katteni Kaizo. It shows here. Manga Dogs is an episodic gag manga mocking the manga industry, with Kanna surrounded by three pretty but vapid young men who are determined to become rich and famous drawing manga. The goal here is not to see which young man in the reverse harem Kanna will end up with, but to see if she can keep her sanity and health (already somewhat iffy given her weekly deadlines).

I’d joked on Twitter that, like Missions of Love, Manga Dogs had a main cast who were basically horrible, but Kanna is the Tsukkomi here, which makes a difference. By now the Western audience should be used to this type of humor, but I will say that if you dislike jokes that are framed as “Character A says something stupid, character B shouts at them that the thing they said is stupid”, with optional table flip, this isn’t the title for you. Kanna is mostly the straight man, though even she backslides at times, such as when she’s gathering reference photographs, or forgets she’s not drawing a BL manga.

Toyama jokes in her endnotes about Bakuman, and there is the occasional nod at showing what the life of a manga author is like, but it always takes a backseat to the gags. There are also many little references that fans of manga will get interspersed throughout – my favorite was the gentle mocking of the magazine Manga Dogs runs in, Aria. Aria is a smallish, cult shoujo magazine (though the Levi manga may have changed that), and the boys comparing it to Shonen Jump and Shonen Sunday is ridiculous (we do, at last, get a new guy who mentions Magazine – but he turns out to be a villain).

There’s not much to this manga in the end – so far the emotional depth is zero – but no one’s going to read it for that anyway. They have Missions of Love for that. This is 100% stupid comedy, and it does it quite well. It’s also only 3 volumes long, so won’t risk going on long past what folks expected, like… well, also like Missions of Love.

By Kentaro Sato. Released in Japan as “Mahou Shoujo Of The End” by Akita Shoten, serialized in the magazine Bessatsu Shonen Champion. Released in North America by Seven Seas.

Those who know my usual reviewing patterns and preferences may be surprised to see that I’m reviewing this title at all, and you’re mostly right. I picked this one up expecting that it wasn’t going to be my cup of tea, but wondering if it was some sort of magical girl deconstruction along the lines of Madoka Magica (which, ironically, I also don’t like). Unfortunately, at least in this volume, the ‘magical girl’ part is mostly irrelevant. The monsters here could be demons, angels, or clowns for all that it matters. They are a massive force of death and gore, who just happen to be magical girls. They certainly do bring the apocalypse, though. That said, I did want to review this title, as it’s a classic example of a title that I personally dislike but where I recognize its good qualities that other readers will greatly appreciate.

The buildup to said apocalypse is short, only taking up the first few pages. Our hero, Kii, is (sigh) an average everyday high school student, who wants to get through his school days peacefully. Sometimes this means ogling the class beauty from afar, sometimes it means turning away when his childhood friend is getting viciously bullied in a nearby bathroom. As he takes a test, he looks outside and notices his teacher stopping a young girl who is dressed quite oddly. That’s her on the cover. The girl then proceeds to blow his head off with her ‘wand’, then goes after the rest of the school. As the slaughter commences, it turns out that the entire world is being invaded by so-called magical girls, who are also able to reanimate the dead to do their bidding.

That last sentence is the most telling. This is, at heart, a zombie manga. There’s a lot of lovingly detailed horror and gore, and much of the second half involves escaping the school and winnowing down our already small cast. Our hero survives, of course, along with his bullied childhood friend (they would appear to have the closest thing this title has to a possible romance) and a busty upperclassman. They make it out into the city, and find that it’s no better out there. Is there anything to do besides wait for everyone to die?

The author certainly has a sense of style in the way he depicts the mass slaughter. The gore is almost artistic in places, as well as finding new levels of sadism, especially in the scene where a magical girl crumples up about 200 people into a living ball, hefts them high into the air, then lets them drop to their death. The combination of gore and fanservice (busty upperclassman is VERY busty, and we’re not allowed to forget it) makes this a fantastic series for young men who would be reading anything in Shonen Champion, the magazine where this runs. Indeed, in some ways it reminds me of a less silly version of Franken Fran, the cult horror manga from the same publisher.

It’s totally not a series I’ll be continuing, but don’t let that stop you. If you like survival manga, zombie manga, horror manga, or just lovingly detailed depictions of cute high school kids getting their heads blown off, this title will not disappoint you, as it does all those things very well.